Seahorse World at Beauty Point, TAS

We were lucky to be able to visit Seahorse World thanks to Sean’s aunt and uncle.  They had a tour and knew the kids would love it so treated us to a visit.  We made the trip up to Beauty Point from Longford via a scenic route that took us right next to the water.  Seahorse World is right on the dock, there were boats to see and people fishing nearby. Check out these limits!  Catch an octopus?  You can keep up to 100 kg.  Shark?  Keep two!  We were told that this part of the Tamar River has plenty of sharks in it.  Not a place for swimming! Your time at Seahorse World includes a 45-minute guided tour.  First they took us into a room with several different kinds of seahorses.  They told us that seahorses are the only species where the male carries the pregnancy and gives birth. Some species of seahorses change colours.  This tank included both yellow and red ones. Then they took us in the next room where they breed the seahorses.  Seahorse World breeds and ships seahorses to places all over the world.  Chances are, if you’ve been to an aquarium where they have seahorses they came from here at Beauty Point.  These seahorses are only weeks old.  There were tiny seahorses in each of those round tanks! Once they reach a certain age they are moved to this larger tank.  There were two of these.  In this picture below the seahorses are spread throughout the tank.  In the next tank they were all huddled together.  Our tour guide explained that they had just shipped some from that tank.  The seahorses fast for a few days before shipping.  Which meant the whole tank had fasted for a few days.  He spread some food in the tank and they started to separate some. These with the big bellies are males.  He told us that the ones with mostly white on their bellies aren’t pregnant, they’re just showing off.  The ones with the smaller, mostly yellow bellies are the pregnant ones.  They can give birth to hundreds at a time! They had a few sea dragons also, which are beautiful.  It sounded like they don’t breed these yet, they’re still learning about them. There were other sea creatures, too, like this giant crab that they estimate to be around thirty years old! We often see cuttlefish bones washed up on the beach so it was neat to see the actual fish.  They had several bones lined up outside the tank.  I thought this guy was quite beautiful. I find hermit crabs fascinating.  These were much bigger than any others I’ve ever seen.  The fun part…I didn’t know this was coming.  We got to hold seahorses!  How cool is that?  They told us that seahorses could go up to fifteen minutes or so out of the water. They were bumpy.  Bony.  Not slimy at all.  They don’t have scales.  They writhed around a little and it seemed like they were almost hiccupping a bit.  Jitterbug pointed out this display on the wall of the snout of a sawfish.  Wow.  Can you imagine coming across one of those in the water?  We later saw a picture of one of these somewhere and he pointed it out to me. Black clownfish.  I’m sure that’s the technical term.  (I almost called them black Nemos.  That would be even less technical.) I wish this was labelled or that there had been a diagram nearby. A few other things to look at… Then we were off to the building next door for ice cream.  Yum. If you visit, the Platypus House & Echidna Garden is right next door!  We couldn’t do both, we just stopped in for the ice cream.  🙂 Then the kids decided to scare Mama. We made the drive back to Longford, crossing the bridge and heading down the river on the other side.  Lovely views. Took this shot of the bridge through the front car window, that’s why there’s such odd colouring in the sky. Love the staircase of clouds we saw that day.   After four nights in Longford it was time to move on!